Grice: Reading guide

Make sure you know what the following concepts mean and how to use them appropriately:

the Cooperative Principle

conventional implicature (cf. Some artists smoke, implicates but does not entailNot all artists smoke)

conversational implicature (cf. dialog: A: Are you going to the party?, B: I have to work. B's answer implicates I am not going to the party.)

conversational maxims: Quantity, Quality, Relation, Manner

flout a maxim/principle

Make sure you understand:

how the Gricean perspective takes into account not only the propositional content of utterances (which is what formal semantics focuses on), but also language as an instance of rational behavior and social behavior of humans; this is why "Logic and Conversation" was one of the founding blocks of the Linguistics subfield called Pragmatics;

why it is reasonable to assume that the Cooperative Principle holds in conversations, in the general case;

that implicatures can be canceled (for instance, B above could say "I have to work, but I'll go anyway") and reinforced (B could say "I have to work, so I won't be able to go");

that the maxims are not taken as laws written in stone, but as reasonable generalizations of behavior that may be expected from cooperative participants in conversations;

the difference between violating a maxim, opting out, and flouting a maxim; also that different maxims can clash (p. 30);

that "[t]he presence of a conversational implicature must be capable of being worked out", p. 31, even though of course misunderstandings can arise (for instance, in the dialog above A can ask "what do you mean, that you have to work?", and B will need to clarify what her answer meant);

why the Cooperative Principle and the maxims cannot be the whole story, and other authors have proposed e.g. the Principle of Style and the Principle of Politeness.

Make sure you know how to:

identify implicatures and explain how they can be worked out using Grice's maxims (exercise A in Kearns' book);